Refresher in Craven’s Way

I began calling this node of poesy “Craven’s Way” because I believed Jungian psychology to be purely psychology, with any paranormal associations a misunderstanding of the collective unconscious. As I read more, though, it turns out that Jung—or at least one of Jung’s apprentices, Barbara Hannah—believed a number of common psychic visions to have, in hindsight, been prophetic of World War I. Hannah had a peculiarly casual attitude to time travel, even, sort of brushing it off as boring and so let’s get back to how much this case patient hated her dad…but Barbara, you traveled through physical time and back. No, let’s not move on to this patient’s personal feelings!

I’d gladly continue differentiating Craven’s and Shades, as I had a simple concept of Shadow Work that I’d rather continue to keep simple (and call Craven’s Way) for the practice of it: the more we experience and parse, the more we miss out on and reject, and that can sometimes generate tension that people suffer from (personally or interpersonally) so Craven’s Way is tuning that dissonance to be more harmonious or even utilizing the dissonance in casting. The metaphysical stuff of it is necessarily phobogenic: when I’m not even a little bit afraid, I’m not doing the Work even if I think I am.

So, while it originates internally and emotionally, 1. it’s witchcraft rather than mysticism, another distinction that Barbara Hannah makes in Encounters with the Soul, the witch being a part of the collective consciousness that demands the whole be subservient to this one part whereas the mystic surrenders the whole self to harmony with the whole collective—and I want to work on not being complacent in the face of the unconscionable, so I don’t appreciate the value judgment Hannah and Jung seem to cast on mystics who fit that description, like, the mystics are in the right for having transcended wrong and right; 2. I’d like to keep Craven’s Way practice-orientated, whereas Shadow Work has extensive theory behind it.

And the complexity of that underlying theory I consider still worth examining, just as I still have mystic leanings and hiccups.

Excerpt from “Creating the False Self” by Harville Hendrix:

A child’s reaction to society goes through a number of predictable stages. Typically, the first response is to hide forbidden behaviors from the parents. The child thinks angry thoughts but doesn’t speak them out loud. He explores his body in the privacy of his room. He teases his younger sibling when his parents are away.

Eventually the child comes to the conclusion that some thoughts and feelings are so unacceptable that they should be eliminated, so he constructs an imaginary parent in his head to police his thoughts and activities, a part of the mind that [Freudian] psychologists call the “superego”.

Now, whenever the child has a forbidden thought or indulges in an unacceptable behavior, he experiences a self-administered jolt of anxiety. This is so unpleasant that the child [represses] some of those forbidden parts of himself. The ultimate price of his obedience is a loss of wholeness.

(…) the child creates a “false self,” a character structure that serves a double purpose: it camouflages those parts of his being that he has repressed and protects him from further injury (…) At some point in a child’s life, however, this ingenious form of self-protection becomes the cause of further wounding as the child is criticized for having these [neurotic] traits.

His attackers don’t see the wound he is trying to protect, and they don’t appreciate the clever nature of his defense: all they see is the neurotic side of his personality. He is deemed less than whole.

Now the child is caught in a bind. He needs to hold on to his adaptive character traits, but he doesn’t want to be rejected. What can he do? The solution is to deny or attack his critics (…) These negative traits become what is referred to as the “disowned self,” those parts of the false self that are too painful to acknowledge.

We have now succeeded in fracturing your original wholeness, the loving and unified nature that you were born with, into three separate entities:

1. Your “lost self,” those parts of your being that you had to repress because of the demands of society.

2. Your “false self,” the façade that you erected in order to fill the void created by this repression and by a lack of adequate nurturing.

3. Your “disowned self,” the negative parts of your false self that met with disapproval and were therefore denied.

The only part of this complex collage that you were routinely aware of was the parts of your original being that were still intact[,] and certain aspects of your false self. Together these elements formed your “personality,” the way you would describe yourself to others.

It amuses me how Hendrix puts it, “succeeded in fracturing your original wholeness” like despair or numbness is an accomplishment.

As unwieldy to incorporate as this is, it rings true to me. Back when I could far-fetch, those vivid out-of-body experiences began to take on one dreamlike quality in that once I was out, the plans and priorities I’d held to so rigidly in the interest of being scientific about this phenomenon…would go out the window. The way I behaved in that—whatever that was—was lustful and mischievous. My then-mentor in psychism, my sibling, and corporeal Cecil back then agreed that was so “so unlike you!” that this otherworldly self had to have been made up of all of my most rejected repressions.

I was glad, then, that that self-of-mine-sorta was whoring herself out and wreaking havoc far, far, far away from the “real” or default world.

In a completely mundane way, we integrated. It was a magnificent disaster. I’m not proud of all of it, there’s a great deal of that integration that still leaves me conflicted…but I can’t say “it was my faery fetch did it” or “made me do it” or “not me” just because it’s not who I strive to be/become; by the nature of this fetch, it was all me. And fortunately, this explosive reintegration, if it could indeed have been disastrous on a notably supernatural level as well, remained merely mundane in its expression—and not even criminal, though that doesn’t mean much.